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TITLE I - Troubled Assets Relief Program

Sec. 114. MARKET TRANSPARENCY. (4 Comments) subscribe to the comments feed

  1. PRICING.To facilitate market transparency, the Secretary shall make available to the public, in electronic form, a description, amounts, and pricing of assets acquired under this Act, within 2 business days of purchase, trade, or other disposition.

  2. DISCLOSURE.For each type of financial institutions that sells troubled assets to the Secretary under this Act, the Secretary shall determine whether the public disclosure required for such financial institutions with respect to off-balance sheet transactions, derivatives instruments, contingent liabilities, and similar sources of potential exposure is adequate to provide to the public sufficient information as to the true financial position of the institutions. If such disclosure is not adequate for that purpose, the Secretary shall make recommendations for additional disclosure requirements to the relevant regulators.

4 comments on Sec. 114. MARKET TRANSPARENCY.

  • As R Murnen and I commented on the House Bill, the bill must specify not merely "electronic form," but that the data be available in XML, whic is far superior in its accessibility compared to opposed to a images of a document, or PDF.

    In addition, there's no reason for the American people to wait "2 business days" to be able to review the assets that they own. Transactions should be posted in real time, and if XML is the data format used, they can be processed by computer in near real time.

    Language like this:

    " ... in electronic form conforming to W3C specification "Extensible Markup Language (XML) 1.1 (Second Edition), and such other formats as ..."

    should be added as well. XML is a fundamental requirement, although other data formats could be optionally supplied.

    The house bill:

    http://publicmarkup.org/bill/emergenc...

    posted by lambert strether (Corrente) at October 1, 2008

  • The fact that the hill [sic] plays these games like not releasing the data for public scrutiny until the last possible minute is a major issue.

    In fact, most economists don't understand what's at stake here - how in the world can we expect politicians to?

    It's appalling, and is a major factor in the subverting of democracy, open source data and transparency.

    The criminal mismanagement of Wall Street meets the hill incompetency meets the real world of 10,000 foreclosures a day now, creating the highest stakes casino in history.

    And as we all know, with a casino, there's winners and losers.

    posted by JP - Cut the BS at October 1, 2008

  • So let me get this straight....Paulson has to disclose news about the companies we buy unless he see's it fit not to disclose any of that information? In which event he will keep such information to himself and his tight knit group of friends? WOW.

    posted by New Yorker Worried at October 2, 2008

  • The "make available to the public" is ambiguous. This could mean the public has to ask for the electronic documentation and wait for the request to be fulfilled. This section should state the information will be electronically posted in at least one public place on the internet (such as Library of Congress Thomas).

    This statement is ambiguous: "PRICING...the Secretary shall make available to the public, ...within 2 business days"

    "Within" could be before or after 2 days. For our sake it should be "at least 2 business days before" so someone has a chance to catch bogus transactions before the money is out the door.

    If "within" means "no later than 2 business days after", then the Act allows the Secretary to go on a spending spree, $50 billion at a whack, with no limit and not even a pause to allow others to look at what they are getting before the money is spent. Elsewhere in this bill $100 million is deemed too small to detail.

    You call this oversight? Absolutely ludicrous.

    posted by Barbara B. from Winchester, MA at October 2, 2008
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